I did not say, You know, we’re going to be eating dinner in less than an hour. In all, everything I did not say would have nicely filled out the entire recording of one of my pull-string dolls.
Yet even the innocuous question I put instead sounded loaded: “So what have you been up to?” As if it weren’t obvious.
“Few CDs,” he said through frosting. “Mostly New York gigs, and a lot of the scene has moved to Brooklyn. Hooked up with this guitarist Charlie Hunter who’s really starting to headline. Some killing up-and-comers: John Hebert, John O’Gallagher, Ben Monder, Bill McHenry. Really hit it off with Michael Brecker at a hang at the 55 Bar last year, and it’s a damned shame he just died of leukemia. Man, between the two of us, we could have done Birdland standing room only. Regular thing in Nyack—restaurant, which is a drag, though with so many venues closing we all gotta take what we can get. Maine Jazz Camp for bread, but also ’cause your brother got a few promising protégés, believe it or not. Working on my own tunes, of course. Long tour of Spain and Portugal coming up in December. Maybe London Jazz Festival next fall. Some interest from Brazil, though that’s not nailed. Money’s not good enough. Cat in Rio’s working on it.”
I was accustomed to Edison’s catalogue of names that meant nothing to me. Eyes on the road, I could almost hear my brother as he’d always sounded: brash, slick, sure of himself; whatever the disappointments of the present, something lucrative and high profile lay just around the corner. I thought: He’d never sounded fat over the phone.
“Talk to Travis lately?” asked Edison.
Travis Appaloosa sounds made up—since it was. “Dad,” né Hugh Halfdanarson, had assumed his barmy stage name when I was six and Edison nine, too late to sound anything but artificial. So we always called him Travis, with an implicit elbow in the ribs, a get-a-load-of-this. Yet during my childhood and adolescence Travis Appaloosa had lilted with the tuneful familiarity of Bill Bixby, Danny Bonaduce, and Barbara Billingsley. Maybe any sequence of syllables that rings out across the nation every Wednesday at nine simply cannot sound ridiculous. From 1974 to 1982, Travis Appaloosa was part of the landscape, just as Hugh Halfdanarson had always hoped.
“About a month ago,” I said. “He’s obsessed with his website. Have you seen it? There’s a quiz on Joint Custody trivia. A ‘Where Are They Now?’ tab that updates you on whatever drugs Tiffany Kite is currently shooting up—”
“Or which ten-year-old boys Sinclair Vanpelt is shtupping—”
“Though you’d be surprised, Floy Newport is mayor of San Diego.”
“The underestimated one. They’re the ones who sneak up from behind. The devious little fuckers who plot behind your back. Who use the fact that nobody pays any attention to them to bide their time, and then make their move when you least expect it.”
Edison’s tone was playful but needling. Of the three kids in our father’s supposedly cutting-edge one-hour drama, Floy Newport was the closest I had to a doppelgänger, although—oddly, since Edison of all people should know the difference—he was confusing Floy the actress with Maple Fields, the character she played. On Joint Custody, Maple was the middle one, sandwiched between prodigies, eternally unnoticed and not especially good at anything. Whereas Edison had reviled the character he most resembled in the show, Caleb Fields, as much as the vain pretty boy Sinclair Vanpelt who played him, I’d identified with Maple Fields completely.
“On that website,” I said. “Believe it or not, Travis has also listed out the plots of every single episode. In order. Several paragraphs apiece.”
“Talk about time on your hands.”
“Too bad we didn’t video that woman back at the airport for him. ‘Travis Appaloosa’ meant something to her. That’s a dying breed.”
“She was about forty-five? The right age. Probably watched every season. It’s a whole cohort, Panda Bear. They’re not that old, and they’re not all dead yet.”
“Only a few names from the shows you grew up with stick in your head,” I said. “As a rule, Travis’s isn’t one of them.”
“You’d be surprised. You don’t use his surname. I still get asked about the geeze more often than you’d think.”
In point of fact, I had gone by Pandora Appaloosa for a while in college. A little lost, I imagined that if other people thought they knew who I was, then I would know, too. But before long, the very query I was courting—“Any relation to Travis?”—began to seem not only like cheating but counterproductive. My classmates at Reed would only want to hear about my dad the TV star; in contemporary terms, I had reduced myself to a hyperlink to someone else’s Wikipedia page. So I reverted to Halfdanarson when I moved to Iowa. In recent years even fans of retro TV were unlikely to recognize my father’s pseudonym, which disuse was returning to the goofiness that had first sent my mother into peels of laughter. But I was mostly glad of having resumed the ungainly Swedish singsong my father had shed because Halfdanarson was my real name.
I’d usually have savored ragging on our father with Edison, that ritual touching base with our sick, stupid history. I rarely discussed my childhood with Fletcher. I hadn’t even let on that my father had been a television actor in a wildly successful show until months into our relationship, and when I finally let it slip I was relieved to learn that Fletcher hadn’t watched Joint Custody when it was on in prime time. Yet no matter how firmly I’d emphasized that my offbeat upbringing in Tujunga Hills was an arbitrary footnote in a life otherwise ordinary by design, Fletcher always took reference to the program as a pulling of rank, and I avoided the subject. Only with Edison, then, could I access a past that, however loath I was to depend on it for a sense of importance, I was reluctant to jettison completely. It was my past, whatever it meant, the only one I had.
I grew up with a set of parallels that expressed varying degrees of distortion and caricature. I didn’t only have a father named Hugh Halfdanarson, but one who doubled ludicrously as Travis Appaloosa, who played another father named Emory Fields, a fake dad who was a far more successful paterfamilias than the self-absorbed monomaniac I saw only occasionally at home. I wasn’t simply Pandora Halfdanarson, but could choose to be Pandora Appaloosa if I wished, and on Wednesday nights for eight years I recognized an idealized version of myself in Maple Fields, a sweeter and more altruistic little girl than I who was always trying to get her parents back together. In turn, Maple Fields was played by one of those rare child actors who wasn’t unendurable, either on-screen or off-, even if Floy Newport was probably not her real name either. I idolized her and sometimes thought they should have kept filming the show and canceled our real family. So you can see how my fashioning mocking duplicates for a living might have seemed almost inevitable. After all, my favorite episode of Night Gallery was “The Doll.”
This time driving back to New Holland our traditional sharing of notes—first and foremost, on whatever crackpot strategy Travis had recently devised to restore himself as the apple of the public eye—felt diversionary and dishonest. As we continued to discuss the latest on Joy Markle and Tiffany Kite, I could get with the program only so long as I trained my gaze on I-80. Side glances at the unaccountable mass in the passenger seat broke the spell, and it would suddenly seem a bit rich for Edison in this condition to be deriding anyone else for having failed to live up to youthful promise. For that dizzying sorrow on glimpsing the large gentleman in an airport wheelchair had only intensified, and I’d no idea how I would make it through the whole evening to come without falling apart.
Calling, “We’re ho-ome!” in the hallway, I tinged the announcement by descending into a minor key, a note of warning that my family would fail to pick up on. Here I’d hoped to present Tanner with a member of his extended family whom he could plausibly “look up to,” but with my brother’s spine compacted two inches Tanner was already too tall. Nothing about being obese diminished Edison’s accomplishments, but I had a feeling that